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Imagine cities that shelter people, not war

By Azeezah KanjiOpinion

Thu., Jan. 11, 2018

After weeks of protest and a petition signed by tens of thousands of people, Toronto Mayor John Tory reversed his refusal to ask that the Moss Park Armoury be opened as an emergency homeless shelter: temporarily transfiguring an edifice of war into a space of refuge.

But for many nights before this — nights when Toronto was locked in a deep freeze, too cold for people to celebrate New Year’s Eve outside — the armoury’s iron gates were shuttered to those desperately seeking to escape the city’s frigid streets, after being turned away from shelters packed dangerously full.

The federal government and City of Toronto came to an agreement to open Moss Park Armouries for shelter beds late last week. (Rick Madonik / Toronto Star)

In 2003, five years after declaring that levels of homelessness constituted a national disaster, Toronto’s city council had asked the federal government to classify the Moss Park Armoury as surplus property, so the site could be used to build affordable housing instead.

“In the early 1960s, housing … was knocked down to make way for a war training facility, the Moss Park Armoury,” read a campaign by Homes Not Bombs, the group that initiated the Moss Park Armoury Transformation Project. “We are campaigning to transform the armoury back into housing to meet the real needs of the community.” The federal government refused.

“The choice of using this building as a war training camp kills twice,” wrote Homes Not Bombs co-founder Matthew Behrens. “It deprives people of shelter here in Canada, leading to death on the streets, and it trains people to kill abroad.”

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How cruelly emblematic of a social and economic order that treats military power as essential, but human welfare as dispensable.

Mass homelessness in Canada skyrocketed when federal government investment in housing plummeted three decades ago. The Canadian Observatory on Homelessness estimates that the country has 100,000 fewer units of affordable housing because of the decline in federal spending — which plunged from $115 per capita in 1989, to $60 per capita in 2013.

At least 35,000 people sleep without a home every night in Canada. In Toronto alone, more than 80 homeless people died in 2017; the median age of death was 48 years old.

The new federal National Housing Strategy, released with great fanfare in November, promises $40-billion for housing and homelessness prevention over the next 10 years. But the hidden catch is that only a limited portion of this money — around $2.5 billion per year, according to Wellesley Institute Senior Researcher Greg Suttor — will be available in the next two years before the election.

This is a fraction of what anti-poverty organizations and activists say is necessary to quell the crisis. And it is a fraction — less than one-seventh — of what the federal government expends annually on war: $18.9 billion last year, the 16th largest military budget in the world.

In June, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan pledged to further expand Canada’s war chest by 70 per cent, to $32.7 billion by 2026. A fortune will be spent buying fighter jets and warships and armed drones — even though Canada faces “no direct military threat to Canadian territory,” as the Rideau Institute, the Group of 78, and a host of other civil society organizations pointed out in a recent submission to a review of Canada’s defence policy.

Canadian bombs and armoured bulldozers demolish the homes of civilians in military interventions abroad, while the slow cold violence of austerity deprives people of housing in Canada.

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And the savagery of waging perpetual war inevitably leaks back home.

Some of the leakages are sudden and explosive. In 2005, two reservists stationed at Moss Park Armoury — one of whom was awaiting deployment to Afghanistan — beat a 59-year-old homeless man named Paul Croutch to death as he slept on a bench outside the armoury. The soldiers’ assault was executed with “military precision,” said the judge who sentenced them for manslaughter.

Other leakages are more insidious. After almost two decades of the “war on terror,” domestic police have become increasingly militarized, armed with military tactics, military training, and military weaponry — adding more weight to the burden of police brutality already borne disproportionately by the city’s most marginalized, including the homeless.

But the images of the Moss Park Armoury gymnasium finally filled with cots to provide shelter from the cold, and the formidable efforts of the anti-poverty advocates that put them there, remind us that another future is possible: a future in which the resources once devoted to enabling the violence of war are used to protect people from the violence of deprivation instead.

Azeezah Kanji is a legal analyst and writes in the Star every other Thursday.

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